Microsoft earlier this year committed to delivering a standards compliant browser when they launched Internet Explorer 8 at some undetermined future point.

According to this article at the Register today, Microsoft has broken this promise with the release of IE8, Beta 2:

This week, the promise was broken. It lasted less than six months. Now that Internet Explorer IE8 beta 2 is released, we know that many, if not most, pages viewed in IE8 will not be shown in standards mode by default. The dirty secret is buried deep down in the «Compatibility view» configuration panel, where the «Display intranet sites in Compatibility View» box is checked by default. Thus, by default, intranet pages are not viewed in standards mode.

This is yet another reason why more than five years ago, I switched to using Firefox.

Mozilla Labs has introduced Ubiquity, a new method of interacting with the World Wide Web - and one that allows you to create mashups and more integrated communications.

We’ll let Aza Raskin from Mozilla Labs explain:

You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to. You’d like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed. This familiar sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching, copying, and pasting in order to do a very simple task. And you haven’t even really sent a map or useful reviews—only links to them.

This kind of clunky, time-consuming interaction is common on the Web. Mashups help in some cases but they are static, require Web development skills, and are largely site-centric rather than user-centric.

It’s even worse on mobile devices, where limited capability and fidelity makes this onerous or nearly impossible.

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One of my favorite recent hobbies has been to look at CSS redesigns of Google’s GMail email system.

In my Apple oriented home office, I’ve used the Better GMail 2 extension for Firefox combined with the Gmail Redesigned 2.0 CSS Skin in order to have a vastly different GMail experience than what comes out of the box. And one that looks much sharper as well.

But without making major changes to G-Mail, Dan Rubin has refactored and relaid the GMail design onto a grid layout, added some spacing, and made a much easier-to-read and use interface for the vaunted enterprise email system. read more

ScribeFire is a popular desktop blogging application hosted in a Firefox extension. Version 2.2.8 includes fixes and some brush-ups. The extension is free to download from Mozilla Add-ons, and works with both Firefox 2 and 3.

I bet they are happy at Mozilla, since the world record attempt in largest number of software downloads in 24 hours was successful. Firefox 3 was downloaded 8,002,530 times. If you participated, you can get your own certificate. I’ve got one.